Our Bob Is An Awesome Bob!

I spent some of today wondering if the domain name www.ourbobisanenormouswhiteelephant.com was available…

I asked the question of what might be the problem on the Just Kampers forum. It was suggested to me that I would need to adjust the stop plate. So, armed with my workshop manual, some spanners and a pot of multi-purpose grease and set to it.

I have black fingernails from mechanical tinkering and I don’t think I’ll be giving up my day job just yet…

Following the advice from Just Kampers and instructions from my workshop manual I took the gearstick off and re-greased it all and tried to adjust the stop plate.

Attempt 1 : The manual was a little ambiguous as to which way you pushed the stop plate against the gear stick so I tried pushing it towards the driver’s side. Tightened it all up and went for a test drive. Exactly the same as before.

Attempt 2 : I decided to try pushing the stop plate the other way even though I wasn’t sure it would work. My thinking was that if it’s in 2nd gear and I push the stop plate towards the passenger side it will restrict access to 3rd & 4th. This was the case. Although I could get all the gears before it was tightened as soon as I did the bolts up I was only able to move between 1st & 2nd. I didn’t bother with a test drive…

Attempt 3 : I put the stop plate back as it was in Attempt 1 but re-checked everything to make sure I was doing it ‘right’. Another test drive suggests that I’ve improved things but…

Reverse – The stick does need to be pushed down to get into reverse when stationary. That’s OK then!

1st – Fine from standing, a little tricky changing down into it.

2nd – Really good when changing up from 1st but again (and this is the major issue really) downshifts from 3rd hit reverse every time, regardless of how careful or delicate I am, or if I double-declutch. The only way into second is to stop, put it into 1st, pull away and move it into 2nd.

3rd & 4th – Not as ‘exact’ as they were originally but working without any problems.

It seems then that 2nd & reverse are still more or less in the same place, even though you should have to push down on the stick to find reverse. There doesn’t seem to be much movement in the stop plate for adjustment, just 2 or 3mm.

Not sure what to do next…

MOT Services Halstead had Bob back and and (bless em) spent most of  a day examining every bit of the gear linkage trying to work out what’s wrong with it and how them fitting one bush could have caused what has happened. 

They’ve put me in touch with a specialist garage (or I could go back to the other one who tried to sort out the engine before) but it’s a fair way off and at the moment I can only find 3rd and 4th gear & reverse, so I wondered if there was anything obvious that could be causing the problem before I attempted to drive the 20-odd miles on all sorts of roads with only two gears

So Bob was back on the drive overnight and I used her to drive to school the next day. Reverse came easy as I backed off the drive, and I discovered why as I drove off. It seems you no longer have to puch the gear stick down to find reverse and so it and second gear are more-or-less in the same place. Nice.

Those who have seen Little Miss Sunshine would have recognised me trying to pull away from junctions in third without holding up the traffic too much or burning out the clutch.

I dropped her back off at the garage on the way home from work and she’s still there.

Ho hum.

Bob’s back. As posted before gearchanges were becoming either difficult or impossible, and so I booked her in again at MOT Services Halstead.

They diagnosed the problem(s) and ordered the parts from VW Heritage, keeping her over the weekend whilst they waited for delivery. Bob now has two new gearbox bushes and a new gear coupling. She’s going to need a new gear stick ball joint at some point too but that can wait for the time being.

Hopefully now we can get a few weeks of Bob-use under our belts without any problems or trips to a garage.

Fingers crossed…